WiseHouse

This tutorial isn’t just about building a house in Hammer v4, the real purpose of this tutorial is to illustrate many techniques you can use for the objects you create.

The first step should always be the planning stage where you will decide what will be needed and how it will be laid out. I’ve heard of people using Lego blocks for this, whatever works best for you will be the best method.

There’s an old process called P.D.C.A. which stands for Plan, Do, Check and Action. This is an excellent process for mappers. First we’ll make a plan, then we’ll create what is required and finally we’ll check our work and take any actions. Your own Quality Control.

If you are having a hard time with the planning part a good resource is the Google Image Search tool.

Stage 1

For our house I want to illustrate how to create at least two types of windows in HL2 (One you can look out and one you can’t), a functional door, textured walls and a basic pitched roof.

Important: Make sure you have Snap to Grid (Shift+W) enabled and reduce your grid size. (Keep pressing the left “[“bracket key until the grid is reduced)

To begin let’s build the floor and with that determine our entire floor space.

1) Select the nodraw texture. On the right side of Hammer in the Texture Group, click the Browse button and in the Filter use nodraw then double-click on the texture to select it. 2) Use the Brush tool to create a brush that is 576 units wide, 384 units long and 8 units tall. Note: If you want your house to have block foundations create your floor in variations of 16 units, i.e. 32 or 48 units tall.

Now we need walls but we’re going to do it a little different than you might have thought. To get the best possible walls we’ll put in our doors and windows first.

Tip: A good measuring stick for your HL2 maps is Alyx. Let’s create Alyx and have her pose where our first door will go. As we’re building the house we can move her around and we’ll delete her when it’s complete.

Class: npc_alyx